I'm comfortable sharing my phone number with friends and acquaintances because they're inside my network of trust. Maybe one of them is writing my number on the walls of bathroom stalls or selling it to spammers, who knows, but I guess you take that risk implicitly whenever you give someone your number. I trust my friends though.
I would say most of my friends have no idea that when they install the facebook app they are giving all of their contact info away to facebook. Sure, they click the button to give facebook permissions to "access their contact list", but I don't think most people assume the worst. That just what it takes to participate in the modern culture.
So when facebook is making a shadow account using my number and connections with friends, my privacy certainly feels violated. I did not choose to share anything with facebook. I chose to share things with my friends, and they unwittingly shared it with facebook. Giving your phone number to a friend is a reasonable thing to do. Someone wanting to install facebook on their phone is a reasonable thing to do. Facebook tracking connections of people who choose not to use (or participate in any way with) their service by essentially exploiting peoples naivete about its intentions, is not reasonable to me.
I can educate the people I know about it, but I doubt I will change anyones minds. Facebook has become a part of our culture, I certainly can't blame anyone for wanting to take part in it. I just wish facebook would leave me out of it and it doesn't.
While this is noble of you, I guess 99% of your (and mine) contacts won't do the same. So you're protecting your friends, while your own number is still shared with Facebook.
This is what annoys me the most. I can't control what people put in their address book about me (physical address, email, photo, phone number, maybe even more infos) and who they share my info with.
When I was a kid, everybody's name, address, and phone number was published in a phone book. Why does everyone feel like that's private information today? For some special people, yes, but for just about everybody, it's fine for others to be able to contact them.
If I wanted to be kept hidden, I'd have to be careful who I gave my secret information to. If I trust my friends, and they carelessly give it to Facebook, that's my fault for carelessly trusting untrustworthy friends.
I for one don’t understand how or why anyone would presume anything they do on Facebook is private.
I’ve always considered what I enter as being given to Facebook rather than somehow mine despite being in Facebooks possession, on their drives in their servers. When I give it to Facebook, it’s theirs. If you don’t want something known I don’t give it to Facebook...
If I give my friend my phone number, that’s their knowledge, not mine. It makes no sense to demand they forget it. If they hand it out, they’re a bad friend. I don’t tell bad friends important secrets.
Maybe they actually are OK with it? I know I am. On most services your friend list is public, I don't see that as sensitive information and if I did, I wouldn't use social networks since info I share with people is already available to anyone they chose to share it with.
Define privacy. If I tell my mother what my girlfriend's name is, that's not an invasion of privacy. If my friend tells Facebook what my phone number is, that's not an invasion if privacy either.
If I share my phone number with my friend, under the agreement that my friend will not share it with others, and he shares it with Facebook, then my friend has violated my privacy... not facebook.
Not that I'm against the concept, but I'd much rather give up my Facebook info than my mobile phone info. I even avoid(ed) giving Facebook my phone number.
I remember a friend was up in arms a couple years ago about their phone number being exposed on Facebook. When I pointed out that's exactly what the phone book had done for decades, he suddenly didn't care much.
So, your comment has nothing to do with the current topic them?
Yeah, a lot of people give that permission. It is in the user agreement.
Not that I agree with wide user agreement, but I'm sure user agreement covers that part, arguably.
Yes, arguably, your friends are rightfully allowed to share your private info like phone numbers and photos. Because they have access to those information.
Not that I agree with it, it is just the current state we live in.
There's a lot going on here. Facebook reports to be a social networking site. As such, one might expect to exchange contact info with someone they meet on the site. Of course, this means Facebook actually has to store it. That's fine.
The problem is that Facebook has insecure defaults. It is reasonable for a person to assume that contact information would only be visible to their "friends" (whether or not they are accepting random people as friends is another issue). Facebook should make it painfully clear that this isn't the case, and give its users more robust tools to control their data.
Of course, even if this does happen (which it won't, because it is in Facebook's every interest to keep as much of your info public as they can), some users will still leave their contact info public and wonder why they get calls from strangers...
Remember when you learned how to write checks in the third grade? I think it is time to prepare kids for controlling their online identity formally...
It's a little more than that when this article is stating that there's a severe privacy risk for people who don't even own an iPhone or have never installed the Facebook application. Perhaps it's not a big deal for you to have your phone number out there for public consumption, but it is for many people including myself.
When the feature debuted, the thrust of the announcement seemed to be that it would populate your local phonebook with contact info and photos from Facebook. Assuming it would quite likely also do the same in reverse, I held off.
And that is what I find most objectionable about Facebook's user experience in general.
Everything I do, every click, I have to weigh: What will this mean for my privacy? Will I accidentally share something I didn't want to? I have to think everything through from Facebook's perspective and try to predict what my actions will be interpreted as consent for the system to do. It's decidedly unpleasant.
The most frustrating for me is social media apps constantly asking you to share your contacts with them. They get a curated database of every name, number, email address, street address, and photo from (I would guess) most users, and that data isn't even yours to deny access to.
Sure, it's all publicly available info, but I don't want services I haven't signed up for having my info without my consent. I don't like that my friends and family can just give them access to all of that data without me being involved in any way.
And the fact that you have to give up more privacy to increase security. I'd rather Facebook not know my phone number (though it's stupid to think they don't already have it due to any one of my friends syncing their contact information).
It's the little things like this that put me off to Facebook. It feels like every attempt to make the site "better" is just another attempt to get more information from a user.
And believe it or not, some people do not use, like, or trust Facebook or Twitter.
Yup, I'm one of those people.
I don't use Facebook, and it's unreasonable to expect me to sign up for a Facebook account so that I can use your service.
I do use Twitter, but I'd rather not share my account details (even just the username) with someone I've just met.
I've always thought that being able to explore the web of information out there about me was kind of creepy, and I'm not about to make it easier for someone to do by creating connections between the accounts I have with disparate service providers. I like when my data is siloed, and only shared on my terms, with my explicit consent.
I just... What? Do people really consent to share that kind of their information? I'm just surprised that people would use Facebook as such an "everything" platform for all the bits of data in their lives.
I guess I've always kept relatively tight control over my data, at least whether I want aspects of data about me to be public. I say that even though I make a tremendous amount of information about me very accessible (name, age, address, family, phone number, email address, etc). However, for other people who don't have that luxury, I wonder why in the world they're using Facebook?
Yeah, I know. However I'm pretty sure that you're not sending your personal identifying information to them. But yeah, minding your privacy often means discomfort, that's just how it is - again, same with people that don't like FB, but their friends use FB messenger. You can use encryption, btw.
You chose to be friends with someone on Facebook which means you very explicitly chose to share your personal details with that person for them to consume or view it in whatever way they saw fit. It was very much clear from context at the time that they would consume it from multiple different sources: the website, phone-specific apps, shared games, etc.
Once someone knows something about you, it's no longer yours; it's that person's to do with as they please.
The lives of others it is. The funny thing is when I say to facebook users that I will post their pictures or other info to some other social network that they don't use, suddenly privacy becomes important to them. I really don't get this attitude among friends.
Same here. I use facebook because I enjoy the content that my friends share.
I am not using it because I believe “I have nothing to hide”.
I am sensitive to privacy and secrecy. I will fight for it every chance I get.
But I willingly share my life on facebook and enjoy the content shared with me. I get more value out of facebook than the countless other services that spy on me.
For example, just a few weeks ago I got a fake hand written letter from a car dealership telling me exactly how many miles I have on my car and how I should trade it in.
My ultimate conclusion about privacy is that you should take steps to protect with you want to remain private. Because even if facebook disappears tomorrow, something else will take its place, including things created by our own government.
It's sad to think that, but it keeps me from naively thinking that what I share online is somehow private... because it's not, and never will be.
That includes places like HN and Reddit. The government has programs to monitor all our profiles on these sites. I am aware of that, and I live my life accordingly.
I would say most of my friends have no idea that when they install the facebook app they are giving all of their contact info away to facebook. Sure, they click the button to give facebook permissions to "access their contact list", but I don't think most people assume the worst. That just what it takes to participate in the modern culture.
So when facebook is making a shadow account using my number and connections with friends, my privacy certainly feels violated. I did not choose to share anything with facebook. I chose to share things with my friends, and they unwittingly shared it with facebook. Giving your phone number to a friend is a reasonable thing to do. Someone wanting to install facebook on their phone is a reasonable thing to do. Facebook tracking connections of people who choose not to use (or participate in any way with) their service by essentially exploiting peoples naivete about its intentions, is not reasonable to me.
I can educate the people I know about it, but I doubt I will change anyones minds. Facebook has become a part of our culture, I certainly can't blame anyone for wanting to take part in it. I just wish facebook would leave me out of it and it doesn't.
reply